Originally Posted by
Oracle
Extending off of the classical view, it wouldn't hurt to read up on hypermodernism. Essentially, it's a twist on the classical approach to chess, which advocates controlling the center of the board by occupying the squares. Hypermodernism advocates controlling the center by threatening the squares with further away pieces. You try to punish a classical style of play, since you're threatening the pieces that occupy the center, thus forcing your opponent to respond, while you get to develop in relative safety.
That's true.
There's two equally valid ways of playing Chess: Classically or Modern.
The classic way of playing Chess is "Occupy the Center", the idea being pieces have much more activity the more centralized they are. Additionally, pawns that are more advanced and centralized act as great anchors for you to advance your pieces and squeeze the space your opponent has to work with.
Modern, or even hypermodern way of playing Chess is "Attack the Center". Often they include what's called a "Fianchetto", which is an italian term used to describe putting your bishop on a long diagonal.
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For teaching purposes, usually we say you should learn to crawl before you should walk, and walk before you should run. The more modern an opener is, the more it tends to break opening principles. Now it doesn't break them without reason, there's equal compensation for breaking the rules we teach beginners. But it's easier to teach classical Chess like "The Italian" opener (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4) because it just helps players get a playable mid-game.
That's considered very classical for a number of reasons.
1) You played e4, so you took occupation of a central square
2) You played your knight out to f3, developing your Knight before your bishop which is the "usual" advice, developing towards the center of the board, attack e5 (where the opponent just so happened to play a pawn), and you developed the Knight on the king side before the queen side, which makes for a faster castle.
3) You played your kingside bishop out. So now it's already legal to castle, you already have a pawn in the center, you already developed all your king side pieces once you've castled. Life's good. Very teachable position for players learning chess.
Worth mentioning, the most popular Chess opening for Both White AND Black at the highest level of play, Super Grandmasters, is the Ruy Lopez (Or Spanish Game), which is very very very close to the Italian.
Which is: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5
Notice the only difference is instead of White playing for the weakness on black's F7 square, he's also forcing tactics early into the game. It's been proven after many years of theory and experience that the double pawns Black will take if White takes Black's Knight isn't an exploitable weakness, and that both players have a very fair game of chess.